Sheriff Bill Gore gathers with media at a command center in Escondido last year.
— John Gastaldo

The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department is preparing to launch a new crime-prevention strategy that uses data analysis and other intelligence to focus on incidents and offenders causing the most harm to the community.

Sheriff Bill Gore, who is proposing a $607 million budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1, plans to hire an additional eight sheriff’s deputies and a sergeant available to deploy to target areas in the unincorporated county.

The goal is to know where parolees and probationers live in each beat and rely on that information to solve crimes more quickly, Gore said. His tactical decision to lean more heavily on crime analysts comes as agencies across the country struggle to make the best use of available resources.

“This way we can target a particular crime problem in a particular area of San Diego County and really have an impact,” Gore said, “and drive down some crime rates in some high-crime areas.”

The department’s embrace of intelligence-led policing signals an important shift in strategy. Commanders had been preparing to assign new sheriff’s deputies to stations across the unincorporated parts of the county as a way to keep pace with population growth.

But the success of their 13-member border-crime suppression team has demonstrated the flexibility and effectiveness of using a targeted approach, Cmdr. Mike Barletta said.

“We could have put two deputies each in Fallbrook, Valley Center, Alpine and 4-S Ranch and called them community-oriented policing deputies. And I am sure those captains would be pleased to have any extra staff,” Barletta said. “But this helps move us into the 21st century in terms of policing. I think we can become a county at the forefront of something here.”

Supervisors whose districts include large swaths of the backcountry welcomed the additional attention. Supervisor Dianne Jacob said the department has done good work in keeping crime rates low and giving residents an increased sense of safety.

Board Chairman Bill Horn said he was heartened that the county is in a position to put more deputies in the field.

Under the new initiative, sheriff’s deputies would still patrol their beats. However, if there’s a surge in activity such as violent crimes or car burglaries or complaints about transients, the command staff could dispatch the team to address the problem, Barletta said.

“In the past, we haven’t had a lot of options available,” he said. “Sheriff’s deputies were assigned to beats and there wasn’t extra personnel to direct to these crimes.”

Dr. Noah Fritz, the county’s new crime analysis manager, said the strategy amounts to putting sheriff’s deputies at the right place at the right time.

“It’s predicting and forecasting, looking at locations that are more prone to crime and targeting serious and prolific offenders,” said Fritz, who spent five years teaching criminology and criminal justice at Metropolitan State College of Denver.

Intelligence-led policing traces its origins to the United Kingdom in the 1990s, during a time of considerable fiscal constraint. Dr. Jerry Ratcliffe was a police officer with the Metropolitan Police in London, where he served in an intelligence and information unit, among other duties.